Confessions (43 page)

T
he university, the classes, being able to live inside the world of books … His great joy was discovering an unexpected book in his home library. And the solitude didn’t weigh on him because all his time was occupied. The two books he had published had been harshly reviewed by their few readers. A vitriolic comment on the second book appeared in
El Correo Catalán
and Adrià clipped it out and saved it in a file. Deep down he was proud of having provoked strong emotions. Anyway, he contemplated it all with indifference because his real pains were others and also because he knew that he was just getting started. Every once in a while, I played my beloved Storioni, mostly so its voice wouldn’t fade out; and also to learn the stories that had left scars on its skin. Sometimes I even went back to Mrs Trullols’s technical exercises and I missed her a little bit. What must have happened to everyone and everything. What must have become of Trullols …

‘She died,’ said Bernat one day, now that they were seeing each other again occasionally. ‘And you should get married,’ he added as if were Grandfather Ardèvol arranging nuptials in Tona.

‘Did she die a long time ago?’

‘It’s not good for you to be alone.’

‘I’m fine on my own. I spend the day reading and studying. And playing the violin and the piano. Every once in a while I buy myself a treat at Can Múrria, some cheese, foie gras or wine. What more could I want? Little Lola takes care of the mundane things.’

‘Caterina.’

‘Yes, Caterina.’

‘Amazing.’

‘It’s what I wanted to do.’

‘And fucking?’

Fucking, bah. It was the heart. That was why he had fallen hopelessly in love with twenty-three students and two faculty colleagues, but he hadn’t made much progress because … well, except for with Laura who, well, who …

‘What did Trullols die of?’

Bernat got up and gestured to the cabinet. Adrià raised one hand to say help yourself. And Bernat played a diabolical csárdás that made even the manuscripts dance and then a sweet little waltz, slightly sugary but very well played.

‘It sounds marvellous,’ said Adrià admiringly. And grabbing Vial, a bit jealous: ‘Some day when you are playing in chamber, you should borrow it.’

‘Too much responsibility.’

‘So? What did you want, that was so urgent?’

Bernat wanted me to read a story he had written and I sensed we would have more problems.

‘I can’t stop writing. Even though you always tell me I should give it up.’

‘Well done.’

‘But I’m afraid that you’re right.’

‘About what?’

‘That what I write has no soul.’

‘Why doesn’t it?’

‘If I knew that …’

‘Maybe it’s because it’s not your medium of expression.’

Then Bernat took the violin from me and played Sarasate’s
Caprice basque,
with six or seven flagrant errors. And when he finished he said you see, the violin isn’t my medium of expression.

‘You made those mistakes on purpose. I know you, kid.’

‘I could never be a soloist.’

‘You don’t need to be. You are a musician, you play the violin, you earn a living doing it. What more do you want, for Christ’s sake?’

‘I want to earn appreciation and admiration, not a living. And playing as assistant concertmaster I’ll never leave a lasting impression.’

‘The orchestra leaves a lasting impression.’

‘I want to be a soloist.’

‘You can’t! You just said so yourself.’

‘That’s why I want to write: a writer is always a soloist.’

‘I don’t think that should be the great motivation for creating literature.’

‘It’s my motivation.’

So I had to keep the story, which was actually a story collection, and I read it and after a few days I told him that perhaps the third one is the best, the one about the travelling salesman.

‘And that’s it?’

‘Well. Yes.’

‘You didn’t find any soul or any such shite?’

‘No soul or any such shite. But you already know that!’

‘You’re just bitter because they rip apart what you write. Even though I like it, eh?’

From that declaration of principles, and for a long time after, Bernat didn’t pester Adrià with his writing again. He had published three books of short stories that hadn’t shaken up the Catalan literary world and probably hadn’t shaken up a single reader either. And instead of being happy with the orchestra he sought out a way to be a tad bitter. And here I am giving lessons on how to attain happiness. As if I were some sort of a specialist. As if happiness were a required course.

T
he class had been pretty regular, leaning towards good. He had talked about music in the time of Leibniz. He had transported them to Leibniz’s Hannover and he had played music by Buxtehude for them, specifically the variation for spinet of the aria ‘La Capricciosa’ (BuxWV 250) and he asked them to see if they could remember a later work (not much later, eh?) of a more famous musician. Silence. Adrià stood up, rewound the cassette and let them listen to another minute of Trevor Pinnock’s spinet.

‘Do you know what work I am referring to?’ Silence. ‘No?’ he asked.

Some students looked out of the window. Others stared at
their notes. One girl shook her head. To help them, he spoke of Lübeck in that period and again said no? And then he drastically lowered the bar and said come on: if you can’t tell me the work, at least tell me the composer. Then a student he’d barely noticed before, sitting in one of the middle rows, without raising his hand said Johann Sebastian Bach?, like that, with a question mark, and Adrià said bravo! And the work has a similar structure. A theme, the one I played twice for you, that is reminiscent of the development of a variation … Do you know what? For next Wednesday’s class try to find out the work I’m talking about. And try to listen to it a couple of times.

‘And if we can’t guess which one it is?’ The girl who had shaken her head before.

‘It is number 998 in his catalogue. Happy now? Any more hints?’

Despite the bar lowering I had to do, I would have liked the classes of that period to have each lasted five hours. I would have also liked it if the students were always deeply interested in everything and posed questions that forced me to ask for more time so I could have my reply prepared for the next class. But Adrià had to settle for what he had. The students went down the tiered seats to the exit door. All except the one who’d guessed the right answer, who remained seated on the bench. Adrià, as he removed the cassette, said I don’t think I’ve noticed you before. Since the other didn’t respond, he looked up and realised that the young man was smiling in silence.

‘What’s your name?’

‘I’m not one of your students.’

‘Then what are you doing here?’

‘Listening to you. Don’t you recognise me?’

He got up and came down, without a briefcase or notes, to the professor’s dais. Adrià had already put all the papers into his briefcase and now added the cassette tape.

‘No. Should I recognise you?’

‘Well … Technically, you are my uncle.’

‘I’m your uncle?’

‘Tito Carbonell,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘We saw each other in Rome, at my mother’s house, when you sold her the shop.’

Now he remembered him: a silent teenager with thick eyebrows, who snooped behind the doors, and had become a handsome young man of confident gestures.

Adrià asked how is your mother, he said well, she sends her regards, and soon the conversation languished. Then came the question, ‘Why did you come to this class?’

‘I wanted to know you better before making my offer.’

‘What offer?’

Tito made sure that no one else was in the classroom and then he said I want to buy the Storioni.

Adrià looked at him in surprise. He was slow to react.

‘It’s not for sale,’ he finally said.

‘When you hear the offer, you’ll put it up for sale.’

‘I don’t want to sell it. I’m not listening to offers.’

‘Two hundred thousand pesetas.’

‘I said it’s not for sale.’

‘Two hundred thousand pesetas is a lot of money.’

‘Not even if you offered me twice that.’ He brought his face close to the young man’s. ‘It-is-not-for-sale.’ He straightened up. ‘Do you understand?’

‘Perfectly. Two million pesetas.’

‘Do you even listen when people speak to you?’

‘With two million clams you can lead a comfortable life, without having to teach people who have no fucking clue about music.’

‘Tito, is that what you said your name was?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tito: no.’

He picked up his briefcase and prepared to leave. Tito Carbonell didn’t budge. Perhaps Adrià was expecting him to prevent him from leaving. Seeing that his path was clear, he turned around.

‘Why are you so interested in it?’

‘For the shop.’

‘Aha. And why doesn’t your mother make me the offer?’

‘She isn’t involved in these things.’

‘Aha. What you mean is that she doesn’t know anything about it.’

‘Call it what you wish, Professor Ardèvol.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-six,’ he lied, although I didn’t know that until much later.

‘And you are conspiring outside the shop?’

‘Two million one hundred thousand pesetas, final offer.’

‘Your mother should be informed about this.’

‘Two and a half million.’

‘You don’t listen when people talk to you, do you?’

‘I’d like to know why you don’t want to sell it …’

Adrià opened his mouth and closed it again. He didn’t know how to respond. He didn’t know why he didn’t want to sell Vial, that violin that had rubbed elbows with so much tragedy but which I had grown accustomed to playing, more and more hours each day. Perhaps because of the things that Father had told me about it; perhaps because of the stories I imagined when I touched its wood … Sara, sometimes, just running a finger over the violin’s skin, I am transported to the period when that wood was a tree that never even imagined it would one day take the shape of a violin, of a Storioni, of Vial. It’s not an excuse, but Vial was some sort of window onto the imagination. If Sara were here, if I saw her every day … perhaps everything would be different … obviously if … if only I had sold it to Tito then, even for twenty lousy pesetas. But I still couldn’t even suspect that then.

‘Eh?’ said Tito Carbonell, impatiently. ‘Why don’t you want to sell it?’

‘I’m afraid that is none of your business.’

I left the classroom with a cold sensation on the nape of my neck, as if I were waiting for the treacherous shot any minute. Tito Carbonell didn’t shoot me in the back and I felt the thrill of having survived.

I
t had been a couple of millennia since the Creation of the World according to the Decimal System, when he’d distributed the books throughout the house, although he hadn’t made real inroads into his father’s study. Adrià had devoted the third drawer of the manuscript table to some of his father’s unclassifiable documents, conveniently separated into envelopes, which had no relationship to the shop nor space in the registry system, because Mr Ardèvol kept another separate one for the valuable documents that he kept for himself, which was his way of starting to enjoy the objects that he had tracked over days or sometimes years. In the library everything was organised. Almost everything. All that was left to classify were the unclassifiable documents; they were all gathered, relegated to the third drawer with the sincere promise that he would take a look at them when he had some time. A few years passed in which it seems Adrià didn’t have the time.

Among the various papers in the third drawer, there was some correspondence. It was strange that a man as meticulous as Father had considered his correspondence as unclassifiable material and hadn’t left a copy of the letters he wrote; he had only kept the ones he received. They were in a couple of old folders filled to bursting. There were replies from someone named Morlin to demands from Father that I assume were professional. There were five very strange letters, written in impeccable Latin, filled with hard to understand allusions, from a priest named Gradnik. He was from Ljubljana, and went on and on about the unbearable crisis of faith that had gripped him for years. From what he said he had been a fellow student with Father at the Gregoriana and he urgently asked for his opinion on theological questions. The last letter had a different tone. It was dated in the year
1941 from Jesenice and began by saying it is very likely that this letter won’t reach you, but I can’t stop writing to you; you are the only one who has always answered me, even when I was most alone, serving as rector and sexton in the snow and ice of a little town near Kamnik whose name I have tried to forget. This may be my last letter because it is very likely that I will die any minute now. I hung up my cassock a year ago. There is no woman involved. It’s all due to the fact that I lost my faith. I’ve lost it drop by drop; it just slipped through my fingers. I’m the one responsible: confiteor. Since the last time I wrote to you, and after your words of encouragement that inspired me tremendously, I can tell you more objectively. Gradually, I realised that what I was doing made no sense. You had to choose between a love that was impossible to resist and the life of a priest. I have yet to come across any woman who makes me swoon. All my problems are mental. It has been a year since my big decision. Today, with all of Europe at war, I know that I was right. Nothing makes sense, God doesn’t exist and man must defend himself as best he can from the ravages of time. Look, dear friend: I am so sure of this step I’ve taken, completed only a few weeks ago: I have enlisted in the people’s army. In short, I traded my cassock for a rifle. I am more useful trying to save my people from Evil. My doubts have vanished, dear Ardèvol. I have been talking for years about Evil, the Archfiend, the Devil … and I was unable to understand the nature of Evil. I tried to examine the evil of guilt, the evil of grief, metaphysical evil, physical evil, absolute evil and relative evil and, above all, the efficient cause of evil. And after so much studying, after going over it again and again, it turned out that I had to hear the confession of the lay sisters in my parish, confessing to the horrible sin of not having been strict enough in their fasting from midnight to taking Communion. My God, my gut was telling me it can’t be, it can’t be, Drago: you are losing your reason for being, if what you want is to be useful to humanity. I realised everything when a mother told me how can God allow my little daughter to die in such pain, Father; why didn’t God intervene to stop it? And I had no reply and I found myself
giving her a sermon on the efficient cause of Evil, until I grew silent, ashamed, and I asked for her forgiveness and I told her I didn’t know. I told her I don’t know, Andreja, forgive me but I don’t know. Perhaps this will make you laugh, dear Fèlix Ardèvol, you who write me long letters defending the selfish cynicism your life has become, according to you. I was once choked with doubts because I was defenceless in the face of my tears; but no longer. I know where Evil is. Absolute Evil, even. Its name is Himmler. Its name is Hitler. Its name is Pavelić. It is Luburić and his macabre invention in Jasenovac. Its name is Schutzstaffel and Abwehr. The war highlights the most beastly part of human nature. But Evil existed before the war and doesn’t depend on any entelechy, but rather on people. That is why my inseparable companion for the last few weeks has been a rifle with a telescopic sight because the commander’s decided that I’m a good shot. We will soon enter combat. Then I will blow Evil up bit by bit with every bullet and it doesn’t upset me to think about that. As long as it is a Nazi, an Ustaša or, simply, and may God forgive me, an enemy soldier in my sights. Evil uses Fear and absolute Cruelty. I suppose to ensure that we are filled with rage, the commanders tell us horrifying things about the enemy and we all are eager to find ourselves face to face with him. One day I will kill a man and I hope to not feel sorry about it at all. I’ve joined a group filled with Serbians who live in Croatian towns but have had to flee from the Ustaša; there are four of us Slovenians and some of the many Croatians who believe in freedom. I still don’t have any military rank, some people call me sergeant because I’m easy to spot: I’m as tall and stocky as ever. And the Slovenians call me Father because one day I got drunk and must have talked too much; I deserve it. I am ready to kill before being killed. I don’t feel any sort of remorse; I don’t worry about what I’m doing. I’ll probably die in some skirmish now. I hear that the German army is advancing towards the south. We all know that any military operation inevitably leaves behind a trail of dead, on our side as well. Here at war we avoid making friends: we are all one because we all depend on each other, and I cry over the death of the
man who yesterday ate breakfast by my side but whose name I didn’t get the chance to ask. All right, I’ll take off my mask: I’m terrified of killing someone. I don’t know if I’ll be able to. But Evil is specific people. I hope to be brave and I hope I’ll be able to pull the trigger without my heart trembling too much.

I am writing to you from a Slovenian town called Jesenice. I will put a stamp on it as if we weren’t at war. And I will take it in our lorry, which is filled with bags of mail today because until the conflict really starts, they want to keep us busy doing useful things. But I will entrust this letter to Jančar, who is the only person capable of getting it to you. May the God I no longer believe in assist him. Please answer to the sub-post office in Maribor, as always. If they don’t kill me, I’ll be anxiously awaiting your reply. I feel so alone, dear Fèlix Ardèvol. Death is cold and I shiver more and more. Your friend, Drago Gradnik, former priest, former theologian, who has renounced a brilliant career in the episcopal curia of Ljubljana and perhaps even in Rome. Your friend who is now a partisan rifleman on the front lines and who is impatient to blow off the head of the roots of Evil.

There were also replies from eight or ten antiquarians, collectors and vintage dealers from all over Europe to specific requests from Father. And a couple of letters from Doctor Wuang of Shanghai, which assured, in shaky English, that the happy manuscript (without further references) had never been in his hands and that he wished him a long happy life and prosperity in business and increasing happy wealth in his personal relationships, both familial and romantic. I felt Doctor Wuang was referring to me. And many other documents of all sorts.

One boring, rainy afternoon, when I’d finished grading exams and had no desire to think about the philosophy of language, I decided to be bored at home, without reading, mouth agape. The theatrical offerings were slim; I wasn’t in the mood for a musical, and it had been so many years since I’d set foot in a cinema that I wasn’t sure they were still making colour films. So I yawned and thought that it was a good moment to finally organise Father’s papers. So, after having placed the
Tetralogia
on the record player, I got to it. The first thing I pulled out was one of the letters from Morlin, who lived in Rome and appeared to be a priest, even though I didn’t know that yet. That was when I felt a desire to clarify certain moments in Father’s life. For no particular reason, not thinking that it would clarify his death, but because every time I looked into his personal papers I found some small surprise that stirred something in me. Perhaps that is why I’ve been tirelessly writing to you for so many weeks, in a way I’ve never done before in my life. It is clear that the hound on my heels will soon catch up to me. Perhaps that’s why I am putting together scraps of memory that, when the moment comes, will be very difficult to organise into anything presentable. In short, I continued with the selection. During a couple of hours, with the introduction still on in the background (we were at the point when Wotan and Loge, enraged, steal the ring and the Nibelung utters the terrible curse that will befall those who put it on their finger), I organised the correspondence and some drawings, which I assumed Father had made, of various objects. And I found, after a good long hour and a half – at the point where Brünnhilde disobeys Wotan and helps poor Sieglinde escape – a text in Hebrew on two yellowed pages of a size not commonly used any more, written in ink by a hand I recognised as my father’s. In it I was hoping to find one of the thousand things that had aroused his curiosity and, when I began to read it, I thought that it was my rusty Hebrew that was hampering a comfortable reading of the text. After five fruitless minutes, with various useless dictionary consultations, the surprise came. It wasn’t written in Hebrew, but in Aramaic camouflaged in the Hebrew alphabet. It was strange to read because I’m more used to Aramaic in the Syriac alphabet. But it was all just a question of making an effort. About a minute later I had figured out two things: first that Doctor Gombreny did her job because my Aramaic was decent; and second, that it wasn’t a copy of an ancient text but rather a letter that my father had written to me. To me! My father who, in life, had perhaps addressed me directly only fifty times, and almost always to say bloody hell what are you shouting for, had written a text to his
ignored son. And I learned that Father’s Aramaic was much better than mine. Then, when I had almost read the whole thing, Siegfried, Sieglinde’s enterprising son, with that cruelty heroes have, kills the Nibelung Mime, who had raised him, to keep him from betraying him. The forest of the heroes, the text in Aramaic, it all enjoined blood. I was surrounded by blood. Adrià, immersed in the text, without seeing it, thinking about the terrible things he had read, let the record spin on the platter for a long half hour before turning it over. As if the characters were repeating their movements ad infinitum, accompanied only by the slight crackling of the needle. He was stunned, like Siegfried, by the revelation. Because the letter read My beloved son Adrià. I am writing you this secret with the uncertain hope that some day, many years from now, you will know what happened. Most likely this letter will be lost among the papers and consumed by the voracious silverfish who always haunt those who keep libraries of old books. If you are reading this it’s because you’ve saved my papers, and you have done what I set out for you: you have learned Hebrew and Aramaic. And if you have learned Hebrew and Aramaic, Son, then you are the type of scholar I imagined you would become. And I will have won out over your mother, who wants to turn you into an effete violinist. (Actually, in Aramaic it said effete rebec player, but my father’s nasty swipe was clear.) I want you to know that if you are reading this it is because I was unable to return home to destroy it. I don’t know if my death will be officially ruled an accident, but I want you to know I was murdered and that my killer is named Aribert Voigt, a former Nazi doctor who took part in brutalities which I will spare you here. He wanted to get back the Storioni violin, which was underhandedly taken from him at one point. I am leaving home, so that his rage won’t harm you, like the bird who pretends to be wounded in order to lead the predator far from its nest. Don’t look for my killer. By the time you read this he’ll probably have been dead for a long time. Don’t look for the violin, either; it’s not worth it. Don’t search for what I have found in many of the objects I’ve collected: the satisfaction of possessing something rare. Don’t search for it, because it ends up eating away at you;
it’s endless anguish and it makes you do things that you later regret. If your mother is alive, spare her this story that I am explaining to you. Farewell. And beneath that was some sort of postscript that made me unhappy. A postscript that said Aribert Voigt killed me. I took Vial out of his bloody clutches. I know that he has been released and that, inevitably, he will come looking for me. Voigt is evil. I am also evil, but Voigt is absolute evil. If I die violently, don’t believe them when they say it was an accident. Voigt. I don’t want you to avenge me, Son. You can’t do it, obviously; because when you read this, if you ever do, Voigt will have been rotting in hell for many years already. If they killed me, that will mean that Vial, our Storioni, will have disappeared from the house. If for any reason there is public talk of Voigt or our violin, you should know that I found out who the instrument belonged to before Voigt confiscated it: Netje de Boeck, a Belgian woman, was the owner. I profoundly hope that Voigt meets a bad end and that someone, I don’t know whom, ensures that he never sleeps easily until the end of his days. But I don’t want it to be you, because I don’t want to taint you with my business matters. You’ve tainted me, Father, indeed, thought Adrià, because I’ve inherited the family illness, you passed it on to me: that itching of desire in my fingers when I hold certain objects. And the text in Aramaic ended with a laconic farewell, Son. They were probably the last words he ever wrote. And not one said I love you, my son. Perhaps he didn’t love me.